From Bullets to Ballots
MARGOLIS, RICHARD J.
States of the Union FROM BULLETS TO BALLOTS BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS In days before the printing press, the memory of interracial wrongs and atrocities was not artificially fostered. Green earth...
...true also, the new arrangements had the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) breathing down the tribes' necks, and on more than one reservation the tribal government that emerged was little better than a personal secretariat to the BIA superintendent, who still reigned supreme...
...Vitus vision of a Wokova...
...Besides, the trial now taking place in St...
...Trevelyan's agitative printing press had been working overtime...
...I think it tells us something else: That streams merge and alter each other's course...
...The earth was first crimson, much later green...
...That may be, but it is not the sort of rejuvenation Means' ancestors yearned for, not a religious revival nor a joyful return to "the old ways...
...Where are the Narragansetts, the Mohawks, the Pokanoket . . . ? They have vanished before the avarice and the oppression of the White Man, as snow before a summer sun...
...Richard Wilson, the incumbent, came in a close second, with 10 other candidates bringing up the rear...
...It is tempting now to say that the light has at last appeared, and that the vote at Pine Ridge spells a rejuvenation of the Sioux...
...I am saying that the Sioux have discovered how to assert their tribal will and esprit in a "Western" manner—thereby blending two histories...
...The St...
...The green earth never forgets, and never stops turning...
...But the process required two centuries, and before acculturation "took," many a Viking battle-ax had split the skull of many a Saxon monk...
...The Indians won't vote for a troublemaker," a businessman in Rapid City told me recently...
...The broad purpose of aim's 71-day demonstration was to revive the Sioux nation—or at least the portion of it dwelling on Pine Ridge-just as the Ghost Dance movement a century before had attempted to recapture Indian culture from the dead hand of white soldiers and missionaries...
...The Sioux—once and for all, it then appeared—surrendered their arms and their dreams...
...They have been trudging down that road ever since, and for most it has proved a cul-de-sac...
...This raises the questions of whether a nation that remembers its heroes and martyrs can forget its enemies, and whether a history of hatreds is superior to no history at all...
...and Russell Means' uppercase pretensions-"We are destined to teach our Brothers and Sisters . . . the beauty of following the ways of the Great Mystery and being a Redman and being Free"—are far from promising...
...The answers are contained in the lintels of Stonehenge, or perhaps in the four heads that reign atop Rushmore...
...that cultural deserts, nourished by such streams, bloom in unexpected ways...
...The Collier reforms have been berated by Indian friends and foes alike—foes, because the new system could ultimately lead to self-determination, thus converting a "vanishing race" into a permanent fixture on the American landscape...
...Nonetheless, the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 laid the groundwork for Pine Ridge's rebellion by ballot 30 years later...
...Essentially a religious rebellion embodying the Indians' mystic response to U.S...
...If the people of Boston could make James M. Curley their mayor while he was fretting in prison, the people of Pine Ridge can make Means their chairman while he is having his day in court...
...Indeed, Richard Wilson's two-year stint as chairman has been distinguished mainly by his "goon squad" of tribal police who have terrorized the reservation...
...and also because more than 2 million Americans have read Dee Brown's popular account of the massacre, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee...
...They like a man who will tell them what to do...
...and that the past may be princely but it is not sovereign...
...All of which is a prologue to the news from Pine Ridge, South Dakota: Last month a plurality of the Oglala Sioux there selected Russell Means—a leader of the militant American Indian Movement (aim) and a villain in the eyes of the U.S...
...soldiers slaughtered nearly 200 unarmed Sioux men, women and children, leaving them to die in the snow...
...The Indian experience tells us this...
...But I am drifting from the subject, which is history...
...I am not claiming that the citizens of Pine Ridge made the shrewdest choices for the runoff...
...Means and his brothers in aim chose Wounded Knee as the site for their extended protest because there, in 1890, U.S...
...Voters will decide between Means and Wilson in a runoff election in February (too late, alas, for this issue...
...That legislation, created and piloted through Congress by John Collier—the best by far of all our Indian commissioners —encouraged tribes to attempt representative government through duly elected tribal heads and councils...
...When, a millennium after, Kipling cried "Lest we forget...
...and friends, because the formal democratic structure was destroying the old selection system in which outstanding Indian leaders—Black Elk, for instance, or Crazy Horse—seemed naturally to rise to the top by a process of silent consent and by what might be called political levi-tation...
...Like the admirers of Richard Cory, they "waited for the light,/And went without the meat...
...Green earth forgets—when the school-master and the historian are not on the scene...
...Certainly not in Trevelyan...
...Department of Justice—to be their candidate for tribal chairman...
...A Federal official in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, declared the day before the election that he could not conceive of any sensible Indian voting for Means, because the aim leader was under indictment for a variety of alleged felonies stemming from last spring's occupation of Wounded Knee...
...Is it the petty tyranny of a Wilson...
...He is, after all, standing up to The Government, an admirable though infrequent posture on the reservation...
...Tecumseh, Shawnee Chief Trevelyan, the Monet of English historians (broad canvases, murky illuminations), rejoiced in the capacity of invading Vikings and defending Anglo-Saxons to bury the battle-ax and live as one people...
...rather, it is a practical amalgam of Wokova and Washington, a distinctly American phenomenon—an election!—pointing toward a final reconciliation among the Sioux people with White ways and institutions...
...That's not their way...
...The sunken stream can flow again," prophesied Collier, "the ravaged desert can bloom, and the great past is not killed...
...True, the plan was "ethnocentric," a naive effort to turn Indian reservations into American Main Streets...
...he was counseling national humility in a time of imperial arrogance ("Lo, all our pomp of yesteryear/Is one with Nineveh and Tyre...
...My children," said the old Ghost Dance prophet, Wokova, to his flock after the massacre, "today I call upon you to travel a new trail, the only trail now open—the White Man's Road...
...But what, at this time in this place, is "the Indian way...
...The mystic militancy of a Means...
...Wretched and half-starved, too weak to fight and too "Indian" to assimilate, the Sioux have languished on their reservations...
...G. M. Trevelyan Where today is the Pequot...
...yet it instantly became a motto to be chiseled beneath statues of Nelson, Wellington and Drake...
...Paul has generated the sort of publicity that might embarrass Means on Park Avenue but can do him no harm on Pine Ridge...
...colonialism, it was misread by the authorities as an armed uprising and was forcibly suppressed at Wounded Knee #1...
...aim has always insisted that Richard Wilson was not the tribe's real leader, merely its elected one, and one of the group's workers told me some weeks before the election, "If Means loses, it'll prove that voting is not the Indian way...
...Of course, the Federal actions against him and five other participants on such counts as conspiracy to commit burglary, assault and larceny—and to manufacture Molotov cocktails—have to many seemed more a vendetta against Indians than a crusade against crime (see my "Return to Wounded Knee," NL, November 26, 1973...
...What we are witnessing is the harvest of a crop the New Deal sowed in 1934 with its much-maligned Indian Reorganization Act...
...Means' victory was plainly a surprise to local white observers, nearly all of whom had been confidently predicting his eclipse and at the same time claiming a special understanding of the Indian psyche...
Vol. 57 • February 1974 • No. 4
